Theory and Applications of the Analytic Network Process: Decision Making with Benefits, Opportunities, Costs, and Risks

The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and its generalization to dependence and feedback, the Analytic Network Process (ANP), are methods of relative measurement of tangibles and intangibles. Being able to derive such measurements is essential for making good decisions. This book is based on the Analytic Network Process and lays out a new approach for making decisions in light of their benefits, opportunities, costs and risks (BOCR) shows how to include the strategic criteria of the decision-maker that must be satisfied regardless of the particular decision being undertaken. This book includes all the important background material from the earlier book, The Analytic Network Process: Decision Making with Dependence and Feedback, published in 2001, and goes farther with new examples of estimating market share of companies based on the intangibles of customer perception, and new applications involving Benefits, Opportunities, Costs and Risks.

Thomas L. Saaty is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Pittsburgh, where he teaches at the Pitt Graduate School of Business. He is best-known as being the modern mathematician who figured out a way to measure intangibles, and is the inventor, architect, and primary theoretician of the Analytic Hierarchy Process, a decision-making framework used for large-scale, multiparty, multi-criteria decision analysis, and of the Analytic Network Process, its generalization to decisions with dependence and feedback. Saaty is a member of National Academy of Engineering (2005), and in 2008 he received the Impact Prize from the Operations Research Society INFORMS for how the AHP has revolutionized the way we resolve complex decision problems. The publication of his books on the Analytic Hierarchy Process and the release of PC-based software such as SuperDecisions and web-based collaborative software such as Decision Lens have led to widespread dissemination of the process. The AHP has been applied worldwide to help decision makers in every conceivable decision context across both the public and private sectors, with literally thousands of reported applications.